State To Investigate Staff Lawyer Over Fraudulent Letter

Gov. M. Jodi Rell said Monday her office will investigate a state agency staff lawyer who wrote a fraudulent letter that helped trigger the firing of state ethics chief Alan S. Plofsky in 2004.

Rell said the actions of former State Ethics Commission lawyer Maureen Duggan in 2004 "certainly were not professional." Duggan's actions will be considered in weighing whether to take any action against her in her current $105,180-a-year job as a staff attorney at the Department of Children and Families, the governor said.

Rell's comments were part of the public reaction to The Courant's report Sunday that Duggan was the author of a mysterious, unsigned letter purporting to be from a parking lot attendant who'd observed irregularities and improprieties at the ethics commission office in Hartford.

The head of a good-government group said Monday that Duggan should be disbarred for fabricating the letter - which was sent to members of the ethics commission in August 2004, setting off events that culminated with Plofsky's firing the following month.

"We're outraged," said Andy Sauer, director of Connecticut Common Cause.

Sauer said that he will write a letter asking that Chief State's Attorney Kevin Kane conduct a criminal investigation of all circumstances surrounding Plofsky's ouster.

Kane's office declined comment. Duggan did not return a phone call.

Plofsky still has a lawsuit pending over his firing. His lawyer, Gregg Adler, filed documents in U.S. District Court in Bridgeport Friday that solved a mystery no one had been able to crack in nearly four years: the identity of the person who wrote the so-called "parking lot attendant letter."

Duggan admitted under oath in a Jan. 15 deposition that she wrote it, The Courant reported Sunday.

Rell, talking with reporters in her office Monday, said she asked her legal counsel, Anna Ficeto, to ask DCF Commissioner Susan Hamilton about Duggan's performance in the more than three years since she transferred there.

Because of the pending lawsuit, the governor said, she won't say what's "going to happen or not happen" with Duggan's DCF job status.

However, Rell said that after reading The Courant's story, she thinks Duggan took actions that "were not anything that a person working for an agency - certainly in the ethics agency - and anyone who is an attorney, should be accustomed to doing."

"And if it is found that those actions are in fact reason for either dismissal or disbarment, that's a course that we would look at, at some later time," Rell added.

In writing the 2004 letter, Duggan intentionally made errors - such as the misspelling "anonimus" - so the made-up attendant would appear "under-educated," Adler said.

The letter claimed that the ethics staff kept "strange hours," didn't put in a full day's work and that a schedule posted on a refrigerator in an office kitchen showed the staff took off extra time around state holidays.

Then-ethics commission Chairwoman Rosemary Giuliano brought the letter to the ethics office Aug. 12, 2004, after receiving it in the mail.

Plofsky was not there that day. Giuliano talked about the letter with Duggan and staff lawyers Alice Sexton and Brenda Bergeron, who turned it over to state auditors.

The auditors began an investigation.

A week later, the three staff lawyers all filed much-expanded, sworn complaints against Plofsky, saying he presided over a dysfunctional office where procedures were ignored and the atmosphere was rife with mistrust, pettiness and manipulation.

In her affidavit, Duggan referred to the parking attendant letter as if she didn't know who wrote it.

She called it "an anonymous letter raising issues regarding the work practices, expenses and habits of the Ethics Commission staff."

The three staff lawyers' affidavits figured heavily into the ethics commission's decision to fire Plofsky on grounds that he:

*Failed to reveal his role in releasing a letter the commission considered confidential.

*Told a subordinate to destroy a tape of a meeting and suggested she might need to lie to a grand jury.

*Improperly accumulated compensatory time.

Plogsky denied all charges, and Adler says he was set up.

Two years later, Plofsky won reinstatement to state employment - in a different job, though - after an administrative appeals board ruled the ethics commission did not have reasonable cause to fire him.

He went on sick leave months ago and has applied for a disability retirement.

The bitter implosion of the ethics commission led legislators to abolish it, creating the new Office of State Ethics and the Citizen's Ethics Advisory Board.